The poison Chalice

The lead up to Christmas is usually a busy time for a designer. Work is generally squeezed in in the lead up to christmas, for no other reason than people think that a weeks hiatus makes a massive different to 'the holiday brand experience of our customers'. Account Managers, not having to deliver anything themselves, also love these 'false' deadlines as there a great vehicle to to try and graft some further recognition for themselves from the client, so they're free to over-promise more than usual.

But rather than this expected annoyance, there is one thing that always makes the designer roll their eyes with pain at this time of year. And it always comes in the form of the 'company Christmas card'

For a digital designer, this brief rates up there with 'redesign the company website' as the job to should be avoided at all costs.....unless of course, you like painful, undirected, waffling and pointless exercises.

There is no brief
Regardless of what people say, these jobs are based on 'nothing'. They are simple a box that needs to be ticked in an agencies yearly communication calendar. And they do it to improve their credibility and keep themselves 'front of mind' (account manager bullshit word there) with their clients. You don't need me to tell you how bullshit that is.

If, like any decent designer, you generate the brief yourself as as I have done on a number of times, then the people you speak to about the project are uninterested. I suspect they think you can pull out of some compartment near your anus.

There is no audience.
More to the point, everyone is the audience. Trying to nail down a brief is a way of trying to focus the goals of the project. But as its the company card, everyone has input and the project is quickly mired in personal opinion that is untrained and unhelpful.

But this doesn't temper peoples ambitions of the project. Typically, and this applies to most design projects, the people with the most lofty ambitions, are the ones who don't have to deliver on the work. This is not to say, designers are not ambitious, we are very ambitious, but its also tempered with focussing on what's right, what's good and what's deliverable.

It doesn't matter
On thing design can bring to a project is innovation, but this doesn't sit well with the lofty ambitions about the company Christmas card, which are a waste of effort because what people really want is not good design, but a hackneyed and twee piece of communication. No matter what you do It's forgotten within a day of being sent out and by the time January comes around, even christmas itself is such a distant memory.

I suspect people think that being enthusiastic about the company christmas card is a way of showing other people in the organisation what drive you have and how your creative ambitions are. To me that shows a criminal lack of understanding about creativity, innovation and design. It never ceases to amaze me that there are people like this hovering around design and advertising agencies when they really no so little about it.

So, if you avoided this poison chalice this year, keep on avoiding. If you got stung with this irrelevant brief (or lack of) from hell, then what I've written, well, you've already lived it.